The World Transformed and No One in America Noticed

The world transformed and nobody in the West noticed. India and Pakistan have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 17 year-old body since its founding on June 15, 2001 has quietly established itself as the main alliance and grouping of nations across Eurasia. Now it has expanded from six nations to eight, and the two new members are the giant nuclear-armed regional powers of South Asia, India, with a population of 1.324 billion and Pakistan, with 193.2 million people (both in 2016).

In other words, the combined population of the SCO powers or already well over 1.5 billion has virtually doubled at a single stroke.

The long-term global consequences of this development are enormous. It is likely to prove the single most important factor insuring peace and removing the threat of nuclear war over South Asia and from 20 percent of the human race. It now raises the total population of the world in the eight SCO nations to 40 percent, including one of the two most powerful thermonuclear armed nations (Russia) and three other nuclear powers (China, India and Pakistan).

This development is a diplomatic triumph especially for Moscow. Russia has been seeking for decades to ease its longtime close strategic ally India into the SCO umbrella. This vision was clearly articulated by one of Russia’s greatest strategic minds of the 20th century, former Premier and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who died in 2015. In the past China quietly but steadfastly blocked the India’s accession, but with Pakistan, China’s ally joining at the same time, the influence of Beijing and Moscow is harmonized.

The move can only boost Russia’s already leading role in the diplomacy and national security of the Asian continent. For both Beijing and Delhi, the road for good relations with each other and the resolution of issues such as sharing the water resources of the Himalayas and investing in the economic development of Africa now runs through Moscow. President Vladimir Putin is ideally placed to be the regular interlocutor between the two giant nations of Asia.

The move also must be seen as a most significant reaction by India to the increasing volatility and unpredictability of the United States in the global arena. In Washington and Western Europe, it is fashionable and indeed reflexively inevitable that this is entirely blamed on President Donald Trump.

But in reality this alarming trend goes back at least to the bombing of Kosovo by the United States and its NATO allies in 1998, defying the lack of sanction in international law for any such action at the time because other key members of the United Nations Security Council opposed it.

Since then, under four successive presidents, the US appetite for unpredictable military interventions around the world – usually bungled and open-ended – has inflicted suffering and instability on a wide range of nations, primarily in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen) but also in Eurasia (Ukraine) and South Asia (Afghanistan).

The accession of both India and Pakistan to the SCO is also a stunning repudiation of the United States.

The US has been Pakistan’s main strategic ally and protector over the past more than 70 years since it achieved independence (Dean Acheson, secretary of state through the 1949-53 Truman administration was notorious for his racist contempt for all Indians, as well as for his anti-Semitism and hatred of the Irish).

US-Pakistan relations have steadily deteriorated even since the United States charged into Afghanistan in November 2001, but through it all, US policymakers have always taken for granted that Islamabad at the end of the day would “stay on the reservation” and ultimately dance to their tune.

The United States has courted India for 17 years since President Bill Clinton’s state visit in 2000, which I covered in his press party. Current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a Joint Session of Congress in 2016, the ultimate accolade of approval by the US political establishment for any foreign leader.

US policymakers and pundits have endlessly pontificated that India, as an English speaking democracy would become America‘s ideological and strategic partner in opposing the inevitable rise of China on the world stage. It turned out to be a fantasy.

During the era of the Cold War, the “loss” of any nation of the size and standing of India or Pakistan to a rival or just independent ideological camp and security grouping would have provoked waves of shock, hurt, rage and even openly expressed fear in the US media.

However, what we have seen following this latest epochal development is far more extraordinary. The decisions by Delhi and Islamabad have not been praised, condemned or even acknowledged in the mainstream of US political and strategic debate. They have just been entirely ignored. To see the leaders and opinion-shapers of a major superpower that still imagines it is the dominant hyper-power conduct its affairs in this way is potentially worrying and alarming.

The reality is that we live in a multipolar world – and that we have clearly done so at least since 2001. However, this obvious truth will continue to be denied in Washington, London and Paris in flat defiance of the abundantly clear facts.

And these two photos (no matter how coincidental or misconstrued), appear to sum up the quo’s shifting status and the accelerating demise of the unipolar order (or at least that’s the way Chinese state-owned media would prefer you think about it).

An editorial (link in Chinese) in state-owned tabloid Global Times published yesterday (June 10). proclaimed…

“Against the backdrop of the chaotic meetings of the G7 of the West…”

“the SCO summit in Qingdao was particularly fruitful, and caught the world’s attention…”

“Unilateralism is strong on the surface, but in reality it’s difficult to sustain…”

The G7 Summit crumbles beneath Donald Trump’s feet, while the SCO Summit got bigger and better. Why not? Erstwhile geopolitical enemies, India and Pakistan, just got full memberships to the real gamechanger in the Eurasian continent and the world, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, making the latter the largest grouping of countries pursuing multipolarity around the globe.

The mood at the SCO Qingdao Summit was a very stark contrast to the contentious G7 meeting between Deep State controlled corporate governments.

Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the leaders of Pakistan and India a “special welcome” to their first SCO summit, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin said the new members made the alliance look as it should be. “Regarding the enlargement [of the body], we agreed that the current structure is optimal,” Putin said, as cited by TASS, adding, “we must see how the organization will work in an enlarged mode.”

“If we calculate… per capita, the seven countries are wealthier, but the size of the SCO economies [combined] is larger. And the population is of course much bigger – half of the planet,” Putin stated.

The SCO initially included China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan when in was formed in 2001. After India and Pakistan joined the SCO, it has become the largest regional body in the world in terms of geographical coverage and population, spanning across Eurasian continent and embracing over 3 billion people. “Thanks to joint effort by leaders of the member states, the biggest regional organization bearing global responsibility has appeared on the map,” said Rashid Alimov, the sitting SCO Secretary General, according to RIA Novosti.

While Trump could not help but display his trumpous conflict strategy in tariff negotiation…

The US’s status as the biggest G7 economy has customarily allowed it to steer the agenda of the club’s summits from its place at the top, the other countries following its lead. But Donald Trump chose a different tactic.

Flouting protocol

There were too many flagrant deviations by the US delegation from established etiquette to consider it a simple sign of Trump’s erratic boorishness. Instead, it appeared that American president was in no mood to compromise, and had every intention to aggravate.

Arriving late to miss a face-to-face with Emmanuel Macron, snubbing Theresa May while leaking pointed comments about her “school mistress” tone, tardiness at the official breakfast on Saturday, and skipping a climate change discussion to leave early, only to give a casual press conference on the way out – all of these were extravagant diplomatic displays of disdain.

The body language says it all.This pic added by Tales

While some have reported that Trump simply never wanted to go to Quebec, others believe he is following the well-known conflict strategy in negotiation, in which he scares his supposedly saner counterparts into granting him his wishes just to avoid the greater risks he is prepared to take. The only man with a counter-strategy to the man-with-the-bomb act appeared to be Emmanuel Macron who simply decided to death grip Donald Trump’s hand until it turned an alarming shade of white, though it remains uncertain if the move was effective.

Trump, of course, has every right and obligation to promote US interests when dealing with other countries. But what is alarming though is the incoherence in his geopolitical positions, i.e.:

Painting the US as a victim of its haplessness – “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing” including a “brutal” EU – as a result of asymmetrical tariffs, Trump announced his aluminum and steel levies in advance of the G7, and didn’t let the topic go, only to turn around at the last moment and suddenly suggest dropping tariffs altogether.

In one of the mostly tonally odd moments of the entire summit, Trump at one point announced out of nowhere – in a mix between a deadpan joke and a power move – that Canada had agreed to drop all tariffs, with Justin Trudeau standing next to him bemused (“we have a ten out of ten relationship,” Trump told the media).

Add to that is his trashing of the Iran Deal, the US Embassy move into Jerusalem, the recent US-UK-France bombing on Syria that was based on false “chemical attack” pretext and the continuing military support for Saudi Arabia in the latter’s genocidal operation in Yemen, all of which do not promote peace in the Middle East.

Whatever the case may be, it is very evident that it is still hard to deal with Western governments that continue to engage in doublespeak within themselves and against their Asian counterparts.

Putin is not amused and is definitely tired of it all…

Even the Philippines have already allowed the “refueling” of a Chinese warplane in the country. This has never happened before.

“The request for landing was received, processed and cleared by relevant Philippine Government agencies. The landing was requested for the specific purpose of refueling and was granted and given with specific conditions for compliance by the requesting party,” Duterte’s assistant said in a statement.

Philippine Air Force (PAF) Tactical Operations Group commanded, Lt. Col. Ritchie Pabilonia, said the request for landing was arranged by the Chinese attaché in Manila.

So, the question in everyone’s mind… is G7

Still relevant?With Russia out, none of the BRICS countries were represented at Charlevoix, and economic data shows that with each annual summit the share of the seven keeps falling in relative terms, as the rest of the world catches up.

But libertarian economist Jeffrey Tucker believes the problems run deeper than that.

Nevertheless, the Trumpian adventure continues in Singapore as the US president is slated to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to give his blessings to the Korean Reunification.

Another Nobel Peace prize is on the way.

If you think both sides are just playing with all of us, then let’s do something by ourselves. One way of defeating the Deep State is to bring down Big Pharma. Here’s how you do it.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on November 20 that Turkey did not need to join the European Union «at all costs». Instead, it could become part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), or Shanghai Pact. The Turkish leader said he had already discussed the idea with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev.

The SCO is a Eurasian political, economic, and military organization founded in 2001 in Shanghai. Its members are Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan speak Turkic languages.

India and Pakistan are to become full-fledged members by the next meeting at Astana in 2017. Mongolia, India, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are SCO observers. In 2013, Turkey got the status of SCO’s «dialogue partner». The other country with the same status is Belarus. Dialogue partners are entitled to take part in ministerial-level and some other meetings of the SCO, but do not have voting rights.

Turkey formally applied to become a member of the European Union in 1987 and accession talks began in 2005. Its ambition to become part of the bloc dates back to the 1960s. Its prospects of joining look dim after 11 years of negotiations. The human rights are a divisive issue.

The EU has stepped up its criticism of Ankara since the failed July 15 coup d’état, saying the country’s anti-terror laws were being applied too broadly. Luxembourg and Austria, as well as some European lawmakers, called on the bloc to halt membership talks with Turkey or punish it with other sanctions.

For its part, Turkey is frustrated with the long stalemate over EU membership. Ankara has accused the EU of treating the country differently regarding its accession attempt and failing to unlock all the cash it had promised to disburse to Turkey on the back of the refugee deal. Turkey plans to revive the death penalty. The move will make EU accession impossible. President Erdogan plans to call a referendum on the future of Turkey’s EU membership bid.

Turkey’s SCO accession would be a milestone bringing together the organization and the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States (CCTS) – an international organization of Turkic countries, comprising Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. The General Secretariat is in İstanbul, Turkey. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are possible future members of the council.

The international organization also functions as an umbrella body for all other autonomous collaboration mechanisms like the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic Speaking Countries (TURKPA), International Organization of Turkic Culture (TURKSOY), and Turkic Academy.

Since its establishment in 2009 the CCTS has made meaningful progress on institutionalizing the interaction. The 6th Summit of the Heads of States of the Turkic Council is expected to take place till the end of the year in Cholpon-Ata (Kyrgyzstan).

President Erdogan’s statement is another sign of Ankara’s moving away from the West to other partners. For instance, Turkey has just announced it is in talks with Russia on purchasing the advanced long-range S-400 air defense systems to protect its skies. It also seeks procurement deals in electronic systems, ammunitions and missile technology. General Hulusi Akar, the head of the Turkish armed forces’ General Staff, visited Russia this month to discuss military cooperation.

During Erdogan’s two-day visit to Pakistan on November 16, the editor of a pro-government newspaper in Turkey said the country needed to develop its own nuclear deterrent. He might have expressed his personal opinion but it confirms the general trend of Turkey’s reorientation away from the NATO’s concept of cooperative security under the US umbrella.

During the August 9 summit in Saint-Petersburg, Russia and Turkey signed a declaration on unprecedented partnership in defense industry. The parties also agreed to form a joint military and intelligence mechanism to coordinate their activities in the Middle East. Russian-Turkish economic cooperation is expected to make further progress with the revival of Turkish Stream gas project.

It should be noted that Russia, not the US or any other NATO member, was the first country to be visited by the Turkish president after the failed coup.

pixabay.com

In late October, Turkey and China also held a trade symposium in Istanbul, signing a total of 36 new deals amounting to $300 million in value. Due to its geography, Turkey has a crucial role to play in implementation of China’s One Belt One Road (Silk Road) project. Turkey is again taking the position as a key investment and cooperation partner that will help bridge the East and the West.

It has risen to become the world’s 17th largest economy and an increasingly important destination for Chinese companies that want to trade and invest. Currently, China is Ankara’s third-largest trading partner, with trade amounting to $28 billion. Turkey is popular among Chinese tourists, and cultural relations between the two countries are developing.

Turkish Customs Minister Bulent Tüfenkci announced in January that the country now aims to triple trade with Iran, an SCO observer, to $30 billion «as soon as possible».

Turkey’s gradual shift from the West to Eurasia and other partners is part of a broader process as the West gets weakened and divided. The very notion of “Western unity” is fading away. Unsurprisingly, as its relations with the West sour, Turkey is reaching out to other poles of power. Further progress on the way of Ankara’s to integration with the SCO will facilitate the multi-dimensional foreign policy to strengthen Ankara’s standing in the world.